I made $1 million building and selling apps using this five-step strategy. Meet Domenica. While working at 9-5 Job, he set out on a challenge, to build and sell a new app every 30 days. So I started a challenge where I just build, scale, and sell projects. In fast forward three years, Dom had quit his 9-5, sold seven different apps, and even exited one of the apps for over seven figures. I think the secret to building a successful app is So today I brought Dom onto the channel to break down his five-step process for building, scaling, and selling an app, how he shipped a new project every month while working a full-time job, and his method to get users without writing a single line of code. If you're looking to build on the side, this one is a must watch. Let's get into it. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Domenico, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. Thanks Pat. I'm Dom, and I built and sold six Microsoft projects while working a full-time job, then applied the same strategy to Softgen, and we wrote from 20k ARR to half million ARR in three months, selling it for nearly a three times multiple of ARR. Well, before we get into all these businesses you built and sold, which I think is really cool, I'd just like to get a little bit of a background on you. What's your timeline? How do you get up to this point? Yeah, so between 2017 and 2019, I tried to launch different projects and small startups while enrolled at university. I studied economics. Then in 2019, I launched my first physical business in the micro-mobility field. Then I had a co-founded backup, and then I left it. Then I worked for different companies as a full-time employee, as an analyst role. My main goal has always been to start something from scratch, my own project, my own business, and work for something that was bigger than the traditional 925 job. I've always used these set projects to escape from the 925 and try to reach something different. All right, so you're in this job, you want to do something bigger, so you decide to do the build and sell challenge. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that was, what were the rules or the idea behind the challenge, and what you built during that challenge? Yeah, sure. So the build and sell challenge was really simple. You needed to launch, validate, and sell micro-business in 30 days. The first product was Peach 2.0, Peach Deck Generator. I worked only for 45 days on this project. I made $300 and then we decided to sell it for $2,500. I thought, this is the challenge, this is the fast execution you can apply to the products. So let's try to do the same, the same, the same, month after month. Then the second product we launched was OneTap.ai. OneTap.ai was, I would say, a very simple Excel formula generator. So you just needed to type in plain English what you want to do on Excel, and the tool was going to give you the exact formula to use in your spreadsheet. In this case, we made almost $7,000 and we sold it for almost $25 after three months. Then we launched yourcovaletter.com and we sold it for $7,000 after 40 days. Very interesting product because you could generate a cover letter based on the job application. Then we worked on RecapUgpt.com, an AI summarizer. So basically you could summarize whatever you want, YouTube videos, presentation, docs, and we sold it for $34,000 after six months. Then we had witsbot.io. So basically you could generate wits based on a doc or on a website. It was not so successful. We made 1K and we sold it after three months for 5K. The last product was a webdesigner.io. You could generate a landing page by just prompting. We made 1.2K and we sold it after three months for 12K in that case. Then we got software.ai. Software.ai was the first AI by coding apps and we grew it from 20K error to half a million error and then we sold it after three months. Wow. I mean, that's amazing. Could you break down your framework for anyone watching on how to think about building and selling apps right now? Yeah, sure. The first step is, of course, you need to set your goals. Do you want to sell it in three months, six months or more? So this is important because it defines, of course, your product roadmap development, your needs, and how fast you need to go. Start with, of course, defining what you want to do with your product. The step two is the validation stage. I usually validated product by using a single landing page builder named yepp.so. My only goal was to distribute the landing page on my X channel, collect emails from interested people, and use the building public strategy. I usually consider a 15% of conversion rate on my landing page as a good bar. Then we have the step three, which is the building stage. So once it's validated, I can start building the product with, I call it the feedback loop approach. So in this case, you need to build one key feature. You need to send the product link to the first batch of users who left the email on the landing page you built. You can ask the feedback and based on that, you can improve the product and relunch it. So it's going to be a sort of loop of build, feedback, edit, and rebuild, feedback, edit. The step four, of course, is the growth. So you need to grow your product. One key strategy here, I've always applied to the organic growth as being the building public strategy as mentioned before. And then the last step is the selling stage. You need to package the business as a asset someone else can run. The most important thing, buyers, one on all, are ARR, growth margins, average revenue per user, lifetime value, customer acquisition costs, the general rate. So these are all key values. And you should always work on getting the best as possible here. All right, Pat, from the future here, we're putting the finishing touches on this video. And I just love the specific steps that Dom is sharing to go from an idea to a bank wire from the buyer. The key here is to ship fast. And if that's something you're struggling with, well, I have something for you. We just launched something called starter story build. It's a program where you will learn how to use AI to build and launch a project to the real world. And the best part is that you don't need to have any coding experience. We'll give you the right prompts to use so that AI does the work for you. If you're actually ready to build and launch your product, head to the first link in the description to check out starter story build. All right, let's get back into Dom's story. When you look back at the projects you built, what was the difference maker? What was the trend in the really, really valuable stuff and the stuff that didn't really pan out? One interesting point here regarding the products I saw is that everything started from, I would say, X. Like all the projects were based on trends and you know, sentiment analysis, I would say, I code on X. The main difference between the projects is based on the trend you were running and the moment. So basically the timing, you know, that's the main difference. Mike, other question that I have for you is around building with a full-time job. You mentioned that you had a full-time job, you were working in nine to five. How did you work on your projects and when did you decide to quit your job and go all in on this? I started before all these side projects while working full-time and I was, you know, looking for something different from the mess to just quit my job and that was basically Softgen. I quit my job as soon as I understood that Softgen could be really, really interesting. While working nine to five, I organized everything in my calendar. So I use different techniques. I would say the most useful one is the Pomodoro technique where you break your work into focused intervals and typically 25 minutes followed by very short breaks. That was one of the most important techniques I used. All right, let's move topics a little bit. Could you walk me through what your tech stack looks like right now and what tools you use to build your businesses? The first projects were built using Babu for a quick development. Then we have the cobotai.com, which is a Joe Rush product. Then we have Pusso, for example, for all the coding part. Then we use for Meitrap, for marketing, Futurebase for the public roadmap, Hunter.io for the outreach strategy, MakeUGC.ai for the UGC creators, Hattio.com for the CRM, Stripe for the financial services, TinyADZ.com. This is for running smart advertising campaigns. CreatorAnte.io, this is useful if you want to start marketing campaign with influencers. Leadit.co for the Reddit marketing, Suna.so for general agent tasks. These are the main tools I've been using for the past three years. Well, thanks for sharing that. Could you tell me a little bit more about what the next step looks like for you? Yeah, so right now I'm working on a startup named Cortex.ai. Cortex is enabling the migration from human to AI workforce. We're going to answer the question how we can go into a company and automate up to 80% of the manual, the mundane, and the ordinary tasks that humans do today. The last question that I have for you and what we ask everyone who comes onto the channel, if you could stand on young Domenico's shoulders when you're working that nine to five, what would be your advice? My advice here is the most important thing today, adapt yourself to different situations and even change perspective if necessary. This is an untold story. Back in 2024, I was almost ready to quit my job. I was ready to jump into another company. I already signed everything. So I signed the new contract, left the house where I was staying. They called me and they said, hey Dom, I'm sorry, but we had financial problem and we are not able to hire you. In this case, the event of course was a negative event, but I changed my perspective and saved myself. Okay, maybe this is the right time, the right opportunity to jump into something different that was up. So from a negative, of course, to a positive perspective, that's my advice to all the young founders. I think what you built is amazing and I'm really excited about what you're building now over in SF. Thanks for coming on the channel. Looking forward to seeing what you do. Thanks for having me, Pat. I want to thank Dom for coming onto the channel. It's stories like this where someone changes their life completely by taking action on their dream, even while working nine to five. These always inspire me. If you're looking to do something similar, then definitely check out starter story build. It's our program where we will help you find an idea, build it with AI and ship it to the real world. In just a few days, you'll go from wanting to build something to actually building it, even if you have a full-time job like Dom did. Just head to the first link in the description to learn more about what we're doing at starter story build. All right, that's it for the episode. Thank you guys for watching. Let me know in the comments what you think, what you want me to cover next. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
